Sessions at FITC Amsterdam 2012 in Concertzaal

Monday 27th February 2012

Learn about Heineken Star Player, a revolutionary 'dual screen' game, which we built for Heineken that lets you play along in real time with UEFA Champions League, and which was awarded Gold at the 2011 Cannes Lions.

It’s time to move away from the safe margins of our screens and experience the sensations of the good old tangible real world. As the boundaries between the real world and what we used to call digital are blurring, we have the unmissable opportunity to innovate, combining creativity and technology to define new emotional experiences and new ways for people to interact with each other.

From the Mind-controlled Scalextric to EELS, a 3D projection mapping multiplayer game. An overview on B-Reel’s approach to experimental technology, storytelling and the tangibleness of interactive experiences.

Golan is interested in the medium of response, and in the conditions that enable people to experience "flow", or sustained creative feedback with reactive systems. He is drawn to the revelatory potential of information visualization – whether brought to bear on a single participant, the world of data we inhabit, or the formal aspects of mediated communication itself. He is fascinated by how abstraction can connect us to a reality beyond language, and the ways in which our gestures and traces, thus abstracted, can reveal the unique signatures of our spirits. And most recently, he has explored the gestures of the hand and voice. In his new work, he has turned to the gestures of the eye, with the aim of creating engrossing, uncanny and provocative interactions structured by gaze. This presentation will discuss a wide range of Golan’s works and those of others, with a particular attention to how the use of gestural interfaces, visual abstraction, and information visualization can support new modes of interaction and play.

After 10 years of Flash development, Grant spent the past 2 years working to produce similar experiences in HTML5. During that time, he and his team have successfully delivered a variety of commercial projects, and created a suite of open source libraries and tools that facilitate the development of rich interactive experiences. In this session, Grant will offer a pragmatic look at the current state of HTML5, share lessons learned, and give a tour of the processes, libraries, resources, and tools he's found (or built) that make working with this technology easier.

The digital world is evolving at a staggering pace, with an ever-growing number of devices and platforms as well as ongoing changes to web standards. In this keynote Mike Chambers from Adobe will lay out Adobe's vision of the web in 2012 and beyond. Mike will be joined onstage by Lee Brimelow, Mark Anders and Deepa Subramaniam and will discuss some of the latest projects and technologies that Adobe has been working on, including Adobe Flash, HTML5, Adobe touch tooling and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Just when you think you've seen it all and writing code or placing pixels at the right places on a screen is everything you ever wanted in life something new comes along which suddenly makes you want to do things you didn't even know you were capable of.

This is what happened to me last year when a laser cutter entered my life. Naturally equipped with two left hands I never made it across the LEGO barrier when it came to building actual physical objects. Trying to work with wood, cardboard, metal, electronics or other materials was mostly a frustrating experience since things never came out as I imagined them. Fortunately for me I could turn to computers where I could undo my actions until they fitted and control millions of particles, pixels or vectors by just a few keypresses. The downside is that all the creations just live on a screen or on a printed piece of paper.

Enter the laser. Suddenly I can make things that actually work, look great and do not fall apart. I am in love. In my talk I want to share a bit of that new passion of mine, show you how to work with a laser cutter, present projects I've built and demonstrate how being able to code makes it an even more rewarding experience.

Tuesday 28th February 2012

The talk is going to be about the importance of self-initiated work in a designer portfolio and how these works can become real projects or lead to real projects if done right. I will include some other designers work as well as my own and with quotes from others on what they think of self-initiated work etc.

In this presentation I will talk about the story behind Abduzeedo, how it started as a simple side project to backup and share my creative process and turned into one of the most sought after sites for inspiration with more than 3 million visitors every month. I will also talk about how sharing was important to evolve and promote myself as designer creating new opportunities in my career.

Aram Bartholl will present current and recent projects from his artist practice including the project Dead Drops. ‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation and was initiated by Aram Bartholl during his artist in residence at EYEBEAM in New York City, October 2010.

Thoughts, Questions and Some Answers Around the Business of Making Digital Art. Combining your passion with the way you make your living has it’s upsides and downsides, and projects that are using new technology present a particular challenge.

Andreas will offer up some insights and observations drawn from the multitude of projects he has been involved in over the last decade at Hi-ReS! and his own company Nanika.

We are at a key point in defining what an interactive experience means to a broader audience. For a lot of users of the internet this does not yet include emotional stories. It's not expected, not looked for. Emotions are about intensity. Smart phones and web browsers are the place of speed.

Can we make interactive content which is experienced, not just browsed? Why don't websites make you cry?

Anrick will explore this theme in a broad sense and dissect some of his recent projects in that context, looking at how they represented a challenge for those who made them, and those who experienced them.

Join Seb Lee-Delisle as he interviews Mr.doob live at FITC Amsterdam. The conversation will explore some of Mr.doob's past, current, and future projects and work, as well as looking at the current state of the industry, technology, and the web.

The global recession has hit the creative industry hard. And it seems that the first thing to suffer is creativity itself.
In a world that has rapidly become even more competitive, how do you stand out, win pitches and make the work you actually want to make?

Remember the market is filled with fear. Clients fear of losing customers. Agencies fear of losing clients. Creatives fear of losing pitches.
So what's the smart thing to do here?

Be You! Create your own identity. Don't compete with the world. Show the world.
Do the stuff you were meant to be doing.
The work that made you fall in love with your profession in the first place.

The work that you commission to yourself. The work that defines you.

This session shows the fine art of balancing between 'work' and 'play'.
No more hiding behind budget and time constraints;